Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Here's another installment in my series of imaginary interviews, this time with a Romney campaign staffer who said, in response to questions about the accuracy of the campaign's ads charging that the Obama administration has relaxed work requirements for welfare recipients: "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers." (That's an actual quote.) This was an especially interesting position to take considering that, as documented in the same Washington Post story, the Romney campaign has in the past called for the Obama campaign to pull advertising when it was questioned by fact checkers.

Q: Why does the Romney campaign continue to run these highly misleading ads suggesting that Obama has gutted welfare reform, when he is doing nothing of the kind?

A: Are you kidding me? That's "our most effective ad." [another actual quote] These welfare ads are really helping us pick up ground in swing states.

Q: But aren't you concerned about the accuracy of those ads?

A: What we are concerned about is that the ads are working. If the ads are working, why would we stop running them?

Q: So truth is not important?

A: Look, there's the kind of small-minded picayune truth you are talking about, such as whether our ads are, strictly-speaking, accurate in a, strictly-speaking, factual way. But then there are larger truths, such as that taxes are too high, government spends too much, and that a lot of undeserving freeloaders are sucking away your hard-earned dollars. Does it matter that we fudge the facts a little in the service of these higher truths?